Measuring Blog Post Success

In this course we’ve created a demonstration environment which is this site plus the associated twitter, facebook and YouTube accounts. We want to create some traffic for you to analyse so you can see with live data what happens. This post contains a video showing the process of tracking a post. It looks at what information you can create and what you can do with it. Measuring blog post success is a easy to understand test project.

We need to be able to track how well the post is doing in terms of how many people are reading it. Its also useful to know how long they stay on the page and whether they watch embedded videos.

So we explain what tool you use at the WordPress end and how to set it up.

Then we look at how this is measured in real time in Google Analytics and compare the effectiveness of different posts. In the video we review a post commenting on Brexit which attracted a wide readership but failed to engage readers with the rest of the site. We compare it with the much greater level of engagement with a post containing a business video.

We also explain how the post can be automatically propagated via Facebook and Twitter.

You can view the video here.

Relevance of Measuring Blog Post Success to the course

We have aimed to create a small but realistic simulation of how engagement can be measured.

In e-commerce sites it’s comparatively straightforward. You measure arrival at landing pages, progress down the steps of the shopping cart and eventual purchase. You can construct a normal sales pipeline and track cost of sales against revenue.

In Business to Business or not for profit sites it’s not so straightforward. You have to define a series of micro goals that lead onto an eventual contact of some kind. Downloading papers or watching videos are useful steps along the way.